30 S MAGAZINE ★ 4 AUGUST 2019
Born
to run
Award-winning director
Gurinder Chadha is
turning the spotlight
on Bruce Springsteen
for her new movie
Words by Pauline McLeod
G
urinder Chadha loved her Saturday
job in Harrods. In fact, the teenager
became so adept at selling men’s
hats she can tell anyone the size
of their head, a skill, admittedly,
for which she has little use these days.
The salesgirl who would go on to change
a mind-set about the beautiful game in Bend
It Like Beckham, popped up in whichever
department the world’s poshest store was
short-staffed. So if she hadn’t wound up in
rock’n’roll vinyl one weekend, it is possible
Ms Chadha might never have made Blinded By
The Light, a film which also happens to be the
title of a Bruce Springsteen song.
“I’d heard of him back then but I wasn’t
a rocker. I was into disco music. In my eyes,
Springsteen came into the old-blokes-into-rock
kind of category,” she admits. But when her
17-year-old self saw his Born To Run cover on a
Harrods display, she was so struck by its image- “because it was very rare to see black and
white artists together” – she bought the album,
thought it fantastic and played it a lot.
Her real Springsteen epiphany, though, came
at Wembley Stadium, where she went with
university pal Dave Cummings and his friend,
Paul Whitehouse, both of whom would go on to
write TV’s The Fast Show. “It was the best gig
I’d ever been to and still is in many ways: the
energy, the passion... It was phenomenal,” she
confesses. “I became a massive fan.”
The Boss was equally blinded by Gurinder’s
chutzpah when she later ambushed him at the
London premiere of documentary The Promise
to pitch a film idea. He’d stopped to tell writer
Sarfraz Manzoor he thought his memoir,